paranormal

An event or perception is said to be paranormal if it involves forces or
agencies that are beyond scientific explanation. Many paranormal events are
said to be
experienced only by those with psychic powers, such as extrasensory perception or psychokinesis.

Some events are perceived as paranormal due to ignorance
or magical thinking. For example, parapsychologist Charles Tart
explains how he first got interested in the paranormal:

There was a time, years ago,
when I was highly skeptical of any paranormal claims of any kind. One of
the things that convinced me that there must be something to this is a
strange experience that I personally went through. It was wartime. I was
at Berkeley, California, and everybody was working overtime....the young
lady who was my assistant at the time worked with me until very late
this one night. She finally went home; I went home. Then the very next
day she came in, all excited....She reported that during this night she
had suddenly sat bolt upright in her bed, convinced that something
terrible had happened. "I had a terrible sense of foreboding,"
she said, but she did not know what had happened. "I immediately
swung out of bed and went over to the window and looked outside to see
if I could see anything that might have happened like an accident. I was
just turning away from the window and suddenly the window shook
violently. I couldn't understand that. I went back to bed, woke up the
next morning and listened to the radio." A munitions ship at Port
Chicago had exploded. It literally took Port Chicago off the map. It leveled
the entire town and over 300 people were killed....She said she had
sensed the moment when all these people were snuffed out in this mighty
explosion. How would she have suddenly become terrified, jumped out of
bed, gone to the window, and then - from 35 miles away, the shock wave
had reached Berkeley and shook the window? (Randi 1992)*

There is no need to perceive this event as paranormal,
according to James
Randi, who recorded this story. A shock wave travels at different
speeds through the ground and through the air. The difference over 35
miles would be 8 seconds. Most likely the shaking earth woke up the young
lady in a fright and 8 seconds later the window shook. She and Tart
assumed that the explosion took place when the window shook, making her
experience inexplicable by the known laws of physics. This explanation
only makes sense, however, if one is ignorant of the known laws of
physics.

note: The Randi article suggests that Tart is the one
working in Berkeley with a lab assistant. Tart was born in 1937 and the
Port Chicago
explosion occurred in 1944. Tart may have been a prodigy but I doubt
that at age seven he had his own lab. The point of the story is that Tart
preferred the paranormal explanation to the mundane one, as do many true
believers.

Randi's talk was given without notes or text, and was edited by the
publisher of Skeptic magazine. I asked him about the story
and he very kindly sent me a transcription of what Tart said. The
gist is that Tart told the story about the girl much as Randi
recollected it. However, the girl was working for Tart at the time he was
telling the story and she had worked in an electronics factory at the time
of the explosion. Here is a bit of the transcript:

One night she had gone to bed exhausted as usual, in the middle of night,
she suddenly found herself awakened and she jumped out of bed, being
overwhelmed by a feeling of absolute horror. She knew that something
absolutely horrible was happening that she desperately wished she could stop
and she didn’t have the slightest idea in the world what it was. She was not
used to jumping out of bed in the middle of the night with feelings like
this. So, this was very puzzling to her. Such incredibly strong emotions. As
she stood there, about a minute after she got out of bed, the windows
rattled, the house shook a little bit. Well, it turned out it wasn’t one of
those things – California earthquakes. But that what had happened, she found
out the next day, was that about 30 miles away in a little town called Port
Chicago a munitions ship had exploded and killed several hundred people
simultaneously. It takes about one minute for a shock wave to travel from
Port Chicago to Berkeley. She felt in retrospect that somehow some part of
her mind had reacted to the horror of all those people dying simultaneously.

Tart tells the story as one that doesn't "make sense in terms of
physics." He goes on to say that many people have similar stories and that
"What you make of them depends very much, I think, on your prior
convictions."

Tart uses the story as an example of the kind of thing
that he thinks justifies doing parapsychology.
Many others, however, get involved because they assume that if they can't
perceive a naturalistic cause for an event, it must be paranormal.
Parapsychology, we might say, is a the science that looks for things it
can't explain and then explains them as paranormal.